Their Father's Shadow

Their Father's Shadow: Masculinity and Coming-of-Age in the Plays of Arthur Miller

Jo Finch, University of Florida

Abstract

Plenty of research exists on “masculinity” in the plays of Arthur Miller; however, many of his best-known works operate at the intersection of masculinity and coming-of-age. Notions of a “man’s responsibility” shift with the generation gap, values are passed on or rebelled against, and sons live in their father’s shadow. This exploration will delve into the coming-of-age narratives in Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, with respect to how their subplots of self-discovery are positioned to contrast and renegotiate the principles of male forebearers. In each of these plays, the self-actualization of a son creates a rift between their created identity and the standards and expectations of their father. In effect, the son’s transition to a new life culminates with the death of this paternal figure, both as an identity and in physical manifestation.

This paper will consist of a close reading of the two plays in question, inspecting the relationship between respective sons and their fathers. We will also note how these relationships alter as the sons create their own identity outside of their father’s domain. Combining this knowledge with modern theory on Miller’s treatment of masculinity, we will discover how Miller portrays differences between generations. This common motif is not accidental, and in it we find a scathing critique of the male inheritance, as relevant today as it was in Miller’s lifetime.

“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.” ― Biff Loman, Death of a Salesman, p.125

As the late Steven R. Centola, founder of The Arthur Miller Society, puts it, “Studies of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman invariably discuss Willy Loman's self-delusion and moral-confusion” (1993, p. 29). I would assert they just as frequently use the character of Biff to contrast his father’s abstraction, owing to Miller’s framing of the thirty-four-year-old son as both flawed and incomplete. Indeed, in a play built on self-deception, Biff Loman is the only character who tries to discover the truth about himself. This journey winds over the course of the play, panning from Biff’s insistence that, “I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life” (1949, p. 31) to a final assertion to his brother that, “I know who I am, kid” (1949, p. 130). But Biff is not inherently different from his father or his brother, Happy; as Grant Williams suggests, “Willy makes his children just like him - men confused by which masculine model to embody” (2013, p. 56).

Plenty of research has been done on “masculinity” in the plays of Arthur Miller; however, many of his best-known works operate at the intersection of masculinity and the discovery of self. Notions of a “man’s purpose” shift with the generation gap, values are passed on or rebelled against, and sons live in their father’s shadow. This exploration will delve into the coming-of-age narratives in Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, with respect to how the arcs of self-discovery in the characters of male children are positioned to contrast and renegotiate the principles of male forebearers. First, we will examine All My Sons and the relationship Joe Keller has with his children; Chris, whose loyalty to his father is shattered Ove the course of the play, and Larry, who died during World War II, three years before the play begins. Next, we will briefly consider The Price, a later Miller play which clearly establishes the nuances of an inheritance, in both its physical and intangible forms. Finally, we will bookend with Death of a Salesman, comparing Happy and Biff’s relationship with their father, and how these sons create their identity inside and outside their father’s domain.

In the first scene of All My Sons, we meet Bert, an 8-year-old boy. Bert only appears in this scene, for three pages, and plays no role in moving the story forward. His inclusion is strange for a theatrical piece, a medium where you should “Never work with children or animals,” as comedian W.C. Fields often lamented. There is only one possible reason for Bert’s addition, and it can be seen in the boy’s interaction with protagonist Joe Keller, a nearly sixty father of two adult boys. Keller has previously convinced Bert that in his basement is a jail, and has given Bert the job of policeman, alongside a cereal-box badge, as a game. Keller now sends Bert off to make “a complete inspection of the block” (1947, p.11). However, when Bert returns, interrupting a private conversation between Keller and his wife, Mrs. Keller yells at Bert, telling him “there is no jail here” and insisting to Joe, “I want you to stop that jail business” (1947, p.11). Bert leaves, distraught. While this exchange is used to foreshadow later events, there is a parallel between the relationship between Joe and Bert, and that between Joe and his last living, biological son, Chris. In both, the relationship is built on a lie Joe makes about his profession, upon which he has given employment and duties to both Bert and Chris. However, when the younger men learn the truth about Joe, it not only ruins the masculine relationship between them, but also the expectations of profession and what Joe had hoped they may take with them. As we will discuss in-depth later, the expectation in many middle-class families was that the son would take their father’s place as the head of the business. This is certainly true in All My Sons, and the pressure of this inheritance is part of what makes Joe’s lie so personal to Chris.

Chris begins the play with an idyllic view of his father; Joe Keller is the proprietor of the manufacturing plant where Chris works. The play takes place a few years after World War II, which both Chris and his now deceased brother Larry served in. During the war, Joe’s plant provided engine parts for war planes, but one day Joe knowingly sent a batch of faulty parts to the Air Force, causing the deaths of twenty-one pilots. After a trial, Joe avoided responsibility, pinning the blame on his subordinate, Steve Deever, who was jailed. Joe was able to maintain his business, providing a comfortable, suburban lifestyle for his family and a job for Chris when he came home from war. Now, roughly three and a half years later, Chris’s engagement to Ann Deever, Steve Deever’s daughter, causes Joe’s lie to resurface. At Chris’s condemnation, Joe realizes the faults he had glossed over were not only in the parts, but in himself. Just as his son Larry had died in the war, Joe makes a realization about every pilot he sentenced to death: “they were all my sons” (1947, p. 68).

There are two intriguing aspects to the shift of Joe and Chris’s father-son relationship. The first is how the acquisition of new information about his father alters the identity Chris has, not only of his father, but of himself. In his introduction to All My Sons, Christopher Bigsby claims that "throughout much of his career, Miller has sought to strike through the pasteboard mask, to explore the way in which what we choose to call reality is a blend of memory and desire, given form and shape by a mind in search of order and self- justification” (2000, p. xxv). In the relationship between these two characters, Miller directly correlates this concept with paternal impression; take one of Chris’s final lines, “I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father. I can’t look at you this way, I can’t look at myself!” (1947, p. 67). The identity Chris has attributed to his father, this second-hand, perceptually-based “reality,” is at odds with, yet inextricably linked to, the identity Chris has decided for himself. In the penultimate moment, when Chris becomes aware of his father’s culpability, Miller effectively reveals the façade-like nature of the identity we place upon others.

Secondly, as Chris brings his father’s attention back upon this moral failure, the identity Joe had imagined for himself is ripped away. In order to return to his life after the trial, Joe had to lie not only to society, but to himself. As Bigsby asserts, “reality is clouded by our fears and anxieties, and is constantly reshaped to serve our psychic and social needs” (2000, p.xxv). For Joe to build back his business and reunite his family, he is forced to buy into the delusion that the deaths of twenty-one pilots were not his fault. This is compounded by the play’s final turn: Joe’s son Larry had not been killed during the war but had instead committed suicide when he learned what his father had done. The family’s schism was therefore irreversible, and though Joe invoked a new identity for himself to build a place for Chris when his surviving son came home, the effort was ultimately futile.

All My Sons ends shortly thereafter, as Joe goes back into his home and shoots himself. The act superficially seems like a form of atonement, but there is a caveat; though Joe is able to admit his failure to his family, he seems unable to repent to society in the same way. Joe claims earlier that, “I’m his father and (Chris) is my son. Nothin’s bigger than that… and if there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my head!” (1947, p.63). There is a generational gap between Joe and Chris revealed in this line, and it is a gap which Miller seems to present as emblematic of the American populace in the years after World War II. While Joe believes the most important attachment is one’s familial ties, Chris refutes this, instead making the claim that the whole country is your family. Though capitalism might demand it, the days of reaching up from the backs of others were ending.

This view might seem idealist to the modern perspective, but Miller was writing at a time of drastic social shifts. He wrote in a restless America. Post-Depression and immediately following World War II, the establishment of men as the head of the household and fathers as the inspiration for their sons was beginning to crack. Miller saw this disillusionment with the social and financial hierarchy and challenged it, specifically as they pertain to the hierarchy between generations. Chris rejects the status, property and ideas that his father hopes to leave him, and so rejects his inheritance in its entirety.

In A New Definition of Patriarchy, Carol P. Christ identifies the transfer of property and position, the inheritance, as an essential element of any patriarchal society (2016). The father’s establishment of an inheritance, and the son’s rejection of it, is a frequent motif in Miller’s plays. A brief inspection of his later work The Price may provide insight into how the ritual of offering and rejection is fundamentally tied to the ideological schism between generations. The Price follows two sons as they sell off their father’s estate shortly after his death. While the driving action is motivated by conflicting responsibilities between the two sons, the younger of the two notes, “It’s almost as though we’re like two halves of the same guy” (1968, p.110). The notion that two male sons are two halves of their father is similarly treated (with far more subtility) in Death of a Salesman, and represents what Miller believes is an inescapable reality. Although we can reject the property and position attached to our inheritance, values and identity are imprinted from father to son much earlier. Indeed, it isn’t until the father has died that the shadow is lifted and the male children of Miller’s plays are able to construct an identity of their own.

In The Price, the intangible elements of an inheritance, e.g. identity and values, are invoked through the tangible elements, e.g. the dead father’s estate or grand piano. The rejection of what is tangible therefore represents the rejection of that which is not. In All My Sons, Chris asserts that he will not continue working for his father’s company and expresses the need to leave this town and begin a new life. With it, he can create a new identity for himself. In some cases, as in All My Sons and The Price, the identity that is rejected is the father’s, which imprints itself onto the son. Other times, it is the identity the father has created for their son which must be abandoned. Such is the case in Death of a Salesman.

Most notably in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, familial ghosts have been a mainstay in drama since its roots in Ancient Greece. The dead brother in All My Sons, and the twenty-one dead pilots he comes to represent, have a similarly haunting effect though they are never seen, but Willy Loman didn’t need to die to obtain the oppressive, ghostly force which affects his children. Yet, anyway, Miller has written at length about his understanding of identity and how the perception of self is firmly attached to our society and surroundings. In "The Family in Modern Drama,” Miller asserts that in all great drama it is the protagonist’s job to externally find "the safety, the surroundings of love, the ease of soul, the sense of identity and honor which, evidently, all men have connected in their memories with the idea of family” (1956, p.36). As mentioned before, Miller believed this idea of family had transcended blood ties in the years after World War II, and now represented the society of America in its hectic, materialistic and confusingly masculine state.

This is the society that Willy Loman is set into; he is the remnant and reverent of an older ideal, and the identity he creates for himself and his sons reflects this. In her biography of Miller, Sheila Huftel mentions Loman as falling only from “an imagined height” (1965, p.114). While this would be invisible from a socio-economic perspective, this “imagined height” is Loman’s identity, and just like Joe Keller, the pasteboard mask is ripped away to disastrous effect.

The identity of Willy Loman is fundamentally attached to his idea of success, and it is this aspect, rather than the morality of the Keller family, which overshadow the lives of his sons. Just like Joe, Willy only wants what is best for them, but his inability to measure success on their terms creates friction. After the elder son’s disillusionment of his father’s identity, the two are torn apart. Death of a Salesman takes place at the end of Willy Loman’s career, well-past sixty, in the house he had made for his family: a wife and two sons, Biff and Happy, both in their early thirties. Happy works in business, like his father, and Biff travels America from job to odd job. They are both back to visit with their parents. Interspersed with their present-day fights and feuds are flashbacks to the boys’ youth when their relationship with their father was dramatically different. This was the family’s heyday, as the two sons adore their father and respect his working, Biff remarking, “Gee, I’d love to go with you sometime, Dad” (1949, p.38). Irving Jacobson notes in “Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman,” “What success means in Death of a Salesman is intimately related to (Willy Loman’s), and the playwright's, sense of the family. Family dreams extend backward in time to interpret the past, reach forward in time to project images of the future, and pressure reality in the present to conform to memory and imagination” (1975, p. 248). Such recollections not only illuminate the imagined successes of a future, but illustrate a dramatic turn in how these sons and their father create each other’s identity.

Although, like his father, Happy has become more world-worn in the past twenty years, he has realized the success his father wished for him. Happy has found his identity in womanizing and work, just like his father. He has stayed in the same city and has lived his whole life in the shadow of his father, believing the identity Willy has constructed to be the only one worth having, and providing a malleable form for Willy to shape. Biff seemed position to grow up this same way, but we find late in the play that the identity he had created for his father was baseless. Biff learns of his father infidelity and sees that he is incapable of bringing contentment to his wife or his sons. For Biff, this moment reorients his definition of success from wealth to peace and spurs him to leave his family and find his own path. While neither Biff nor Happy have found the success they are looking for by the start of the play, Biff has realized his failure, and as Miller wrote in his description of the characters, “(Happy), like his brother, is lost, but in a different way, for he has never allowed himself to turn his face toward defeat” (1949, p. 28).

Over the course of the play, very little changes for the two sons. Until the final scenes, their relationship with their father remains constant, and instead the audience grasps their arc through flashbacks and memories recalled. However, the death of their father once again challenges them to renegotiate their identities and the identity they imagined for Willy. In all three of the plays mentioned, the son’s transition to a new identity demands the death of his paternal figure. Until the death of his father, Biff believes he is lost. What this new identity is, that allows him to tell his brother “I know who I am, kid” (1949, p. 130), is a mystery, but we know what causes it. In The Price, it is the two brothers’ evaluation of their inheritance, in both its tangible and intangible forms, with allows them to expel the demons of their past. Even if they grow no closer because of it, they at least realize the fundamental differences in their identity, “like two halves of the same guy” (1968, p.110). In All My Sons, the values that make up a father’s identity are ripped away, exposed as malignant and cursing those who grew up in their father’s shadow.

In each of these plays, the self-actualization of a son creates a rift between their created identity and the standards and expectations of their father. This common motif is not accidental, and in it we find a scathing critique of the male inheritance. While perhaps Miller might have further developed such notions in regard to gender (every woman in the plays mentioned are rather one-dimensional and exist sans arc, and the binary attribution of every character as male/female is unfortunate to the modern reader), such criticism is outside the scope of this paper. Instead, Miller’s treatment of the intersection between masculinity and the establishment of one’s identity is emblematic of the shift between family and society in the years following World War II, a shift we still see the vestiges of today.

Works Cited

Bigsby, Christopher. "Introduction." Miller, Arthur. All My Sons. Penguin Books, 2000. vii-xxvi.

Centola, Steven R. "Family Values in Death of a Salesman." CLA Journal 37.1 (1993): 29-41.

Christ, Carol P. "A New Definition of Patriarchy: Control of Women’s Sexuality, Private Property, and War." Feminist Theology 24.3 (2016): 214-225.

Huftel, Sheila. Arthur Miller: The Burning Glass. The Citadel Press, 1965.

Jacobson, Irving. "Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman." American Literature 47.2 (1975): 247-258.

Miller, Arthur. All My Sons. Dramatist Play Services, Inc., 1947.

—. "Death of a Salesman." The Portable Arthur Miller. Penguin Books, 1949. 19-131.

—. "The Family in Modern Drama." Atlantic Monthly (1956): 36-37.

—. The Price. The Viking Press, Inc, 1968.

Williams, Grant. "'Death of a Salesman' and Postwar Masculine Malaise." The Arthur Miller Journal 8.1 (2013): 53-68.

Download the paper here

Jo Finch (he/him) is in his final year at UF, graduating this semester with B.A.’s in Theatre and English. Previously published with the 805 Literary Journal and Prism Magazine, his research interests include digital medias, hypertext and theatrical storytelling. Today, he is presenting on the motif of fatherhood in the plays of Arthur Miller.